I once saw a man playing chess alone for three hours straight. There was nobody on the other side — he just moved the pieces himself — and the person next to him said he was playing against himself. Right then I thought of The Story of Chess.
Zweig wrote about Dr. B, who got locked in an empty room with the curtains sewn shut and the lights on twenty-four hours a day. There were no books, no paper, no sound. An interrogation came every few weeks, and the rest of the time was just waiting. He counted from one to ten thousand and then back down again. He memorized the phone book and the train schedule, finishing one city and moving on to the next. By the third month of doing all this, his brain felt like a clean wooden board where nothing would stay.
Then one day he stole a chess piece from a chair in the interrogation room. He turned it over in his trembling hands — not because he was scared, but because he hadn’t seen words for such a long time. He went back to his room and started reciting, replaying the moves in his mind. And on the night he finished memorizing a hundred and fifty chess games, he found himself standing on the edge of a cliff, wondering what he was supposed to do next.
He decided to play against himself. Zweig writes it very calmly: you have to split yourself into two people. The white side makes a move, and the black side has to pretend it doesn’t know what the white side is planning — and that black side is also you. You are both the liar and the one being lied to. It works at first, but after a few moves you get confused. Dr. B said you start to hate your opposite self, because he’s always tearing apart your plan. But you can’t stop — stopping means going back to that empty room.
He had thousands of games stored in his mind, and every single one was two people arguing with the same mouth. Eventually he couldn’t tell which move was his own thought anymore. Two voices sounded at the same time. He started hitting the wall in his room, then collapsed in the hallway. After they sent him to the hospital, the doctor told him: you can’t play chess anymore.
That man moving chess pieces alone in the park, I wonder if he ever got to that point. He moved the white bishop, then sat back in his chair and stared at the board for a long time, like he was waiting for the black side to respond. Then he reached out and moved the black knight, very slowly, as if he was hesitating. The piece made a soft sound on the board, and that sound belonged only to him.
Later, Dr. B won the world championship on a ship. In the first game, he crushed his opponent with that crazy intuition that his imprisonment had forced into him. In the second game, the opponent deliberately stalled. Dr. B sat in front of the board and waited — and then the voice inside his head came back. He started playing all those games from the empty room in his mind. His hands began to shake, and the piece slipped through his fingers. They helped him out of the cabin, and he curled up on a chair on the deck with his eyes closed and his lips moving, like he was talking to someone who wasn’t there.
Zweig never let Dr. B defeat the demon. He won one game of chess, and then he was completely broken. The empty room followed him onto that ship and stayed living inside his mind. The game against the world champion was just a way to show everyone the truth: he could never go back.
The man in the park packed up his pieces and left. The chessboard was tucked under his arm, the folding chair slung over his shoulder, and he walked off slowly. I just stood there watching, wondering if he would play another game when he got home. Maybe not. Maybe he already knew that once you start playing certain games with yourself, you can’t find a reason to stop.
That night I got up from the couch and walked around the living room several times. I wasn’t excited, just a little panicked. Dr. B’s story reminded me of the time when work had me most stressed out. I would lie in bed every night and couldn’t stop thinking. I kept replaying what I had said during the day, rewording it, as if I could somehow get those words right. That feeling of competing with yourself — I know it doesn’t just disappear because you left that room.
The Story of Chess didn’t teach me how to stop, but it made me feel that this panic wasn’t my fault. That man playing chess with himself in the room wasn’t crazy. He was just too sober to lie to himself that he was okay.
